While The Rest Of Fox News Celebrates GOP Win, Beck Doubles Down With A Puppet Show Of Fear Mongering

On Wednesday (11/3/10), while the rest of the country was talking about the election, Glenn Beck went on a rant about the Fed’s move to buy Treasury securities via a process known as quantitative easing. It was a typical Beck presentation: misinformation combined with theatrics, self-important histrionics and, most of all, incendiary fear mongering. In this case, we’ve got 15 days before “Lights Out America.” And guess what? It’s all the fault of Harry Reid, the unions and, who else, George Soros.

At the beginning, Beck wrote on his blackboard, GOVERNMENT DOES NOT CREATE JOBS! Has he ever heard of all the people government agencies employ? What about the New Deal? The conservative FactCheck.org says, “Yes, the stimulus legislation increased employment, despite false Republican claims to the contrary." FactCheck credits the stimulus for creating 1.4 - 3.3 million jobs, and lowering the jobless rate between 0.7% and 1.8%.

But Beck was not too interested in statistics or facts. He brought out puppets instead. He said, “It feels like we’re watching a puppet show because nothing seems real to me right now… Who does the puppet belong to?... Who do the hands belong to? What are their real intentions?”

He promised to show us the hand next week.

This day, Beck told us, what’s going on behind the scenes is “so wide reaching that it will not only affect your daily life, it will affect your children and your grandchildren’s lives. Today is a historic day and not because of the election.”

No, it was because of quantitative easing. As the Los Angeles Times describes it, “By buying Treasury bonds, the central bank hopes to keep longer-term interest rates low and put more money to work in the economy. But it also risks driving the dollar's value sharply lower and fueling inflation.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got my concerns about the plan, too. But for Beck, concern equals doom. “It will take 15 days… before your life is over. Everything you believe… Lights out America.” We’ll find it all out on Friday, presumably leaving us two fewer days to work out a solution for ourselves (I wonder if Goldline will have a special “America going out of existence” sale, starting Friday).

Meanwhile, Beck compared quantitative easing to “the last bag of antibiotics… Once those antibiotics don’t work on you – Bye, bye.”

“Here’s how it works,” Beck said, as he went to the chalkboard with his pointer. Professor Beck lectured that one of the reasons we don’t have jobs is because we don’t make anything in America. Why not? Because pensions have caused manufacturers to move offshore. “Right now we have the big union bosses here. And they want their pensions. They want to make sure their pensions are paid for. So the big union boss here goes to Uncle Sam (with cash).” Actually, Beck meant Harry Reid, that the unions help out Reid with cash to help him get elected.

From there, it was a confusing path through Beck’s convoluted thinking. Somehow, the Chinese will refuse to lend us any more money because they know we won’t make anything, thanks to the unions. So we’ll have to raise the interest rates on our bonds.

“You know where that leads us? Extra broke! …Your dollar is going to be worth less and eventually worthless! …All of this happens by the second quarter of 2011. Wow, that’s not very far away.”

Beck wondered why someone would want to do this and make the announcement the day after a huge election. He had a theory, of course. It’s a George Soros plot for an “orderly decline of the dollar.”

So maybe Goldline will have a special George Soros sale in June, 2011 – assuming we’re still around by then.